Today, I am 37 years old. I've known it was coming, at least for 365 days now, though I'm not sure what to make of it. The past couple of years have certainly brought some things one might consider part of growing old — buying a house, getting engaged, securing a financial planner to ensure I'm meeting my retirement goals.
They've also brought with them a physical reckoning with my aging — learning my body is starting to wear down and I can't just do anything I want anymore.
Still, I find myself waiting for that day when I've made to that point in my life where I've made it, instead of trying to make it. The time when life bestows its glorious wisdom on me and I can start to impart it on others. Or at least that long-awaited plateau when I feel I'm no longer figuring out how to make it through life, and I am simply living it to the best of my ability.
I guess part of growing older is realizing you'll never actually arrive at such a place. Best to just share what you learn along the way and quit worrying if you are actually in a place of wisdom and statue and knowing to do so.
Some time ago, I came up with a foolish idea to write "37 things I've learned at 37." Like many of my ideas, it was an overly ambitious one that I started and then, thinking I had plenty of time to finish, put it off until it was too late to finish.
In many ways, this is a good thing. No one has time to read me drone on about 37 bits of life wisdom anyway. Also, it's difficult to settle on 37 things that don't veer off into the trivial and trite, or that I wouldn't want to recant later.
So instead, I've settled on 3+7 (commonly referred to as 10) things I've learned at 37. They reflect some things I am holding closely as wisdom and help these days. They may or may not be universally true, or even helpful. I hope they may be, in some small ways. They are, at least, things I try to tell myself as I attempt to age in some kind of graceful way.
10. You’re most likely not drinking enough water or getting enough sleep.
None of us are really. Try to do better, but don’t be hard on yourself about it.
Oh, and breathe, too. We're all holding so much stress in just by sitting upright, carrying on throughout the day, being weighed down by stress and anxiety. Breathe deep. In through the nose and out through the mouth. It will all be alright. So much of our worries and weights and stress can be let go just by breathing.
9. You will make time for the things you want to make time for. Or you won’t.
There are not shortage of things in our lives that will waste your time for you. To make the most of your time, you literally have to intentionally MAKE the time for it. Whether it's photography or writing or reading or any other thing I've focused on doing more, this past year has taught me there's never a magic time when I feel like I have time for these things.
So I've learned to make times for things that I really want to do in order to put aside some of the things I'm less keen to do and to avoid getting distracted that can easily waste my free time.
I'm still working on it, to be sure. Getting older is a constant battle of figuring out what you have to do, what you need to do and what you want to do.
8. Music is a balm for many ills. Dancing, too.
If you find you’re feeling in a funk, you probably need to let the funk out. Crank up your favorite music, move your body and get out of your head, just for a bit.
Don't worry. The world isn't going to end if you take a dance break. I highly recommend Queen if you need a place to start.
We live too much in our heads, I'm sure of it. We need to let other parts of who we are move and be and express themselves freely.
7. Don't depend on your job to live out your passions.
I speak from my own experience here, when I placed so much of my own happiness and joy and passion on what I was doing in my career. For almost two years now, I've been navigating a more "normal" life where I can better separate work from my personal life, and this is one of my biggest learnings.
We have to do things outside of our "work" that help us feel human and connected and creative.
We say people should live out their passions through their "work." Call me cynical but I think that's a myth. Most of us aren't that lucky. And besides, some of the joy will always be sapped when we do something because someone else expects us to or we must do it in exchange for a salary.
I'm more than happy to be proven wrong on this.
Until then, I say find work that is somewhat meaningful and beneficial, then live out your passions on your own time. Do them for the love of them, rather than what value someone else places on them. You will get much more joy out of your passions when the only expectations they are riding on are your own.
6. You can get so used to living in pain that you think that’s just normal.
Don’t let it happen to you. If it hurts, tell someone. Talk to a doctor or therapist or your loved ones. Yell, scream, cry, confront if you have to. We allow so much pain to fester in the name of decorum. Don’t suffer alone and don’t ever accept pain as normal.
5. Healing can feel like a kind of death, by the way.
A death of the you that you used to be.
It can also just be downright painful when you come back to yourself and stop trying to numb away the pain. Feeling all your feelings is good; it can hurt, too, though.
Like any medical treatment or surgery, healing often means it will hurt a lot before it gets better. Healing is scary, too. So just know if you are trying to heal yourself, you are doing some of the bravest work you can do.
4. Some of the best food can be made with just salt and pepper.
There's at least a dozen applications for this, metaphorical or otherwise.
I'm actually just talking about food here though. I'm guilty of not savoring my food enough. As I've been cooking at home much more this year, I've come to find just how good food can taste with some salt and some pepper. Go a little heavier on the pepper. Garlic is a bonus.
If nothing else, the wisdom here is: take time to taste your food. Try to peel apart its flavors in your mouth. Guess at what ingredients you might be tasting, if you didn't cook it yourself.
I think we suffer from eating too fast and tasting too little. And because of that, we choose to dress up our food with hot sauces and cheese and dressings so we can actually taste it. All we really need is some salt and a good bit of pepper.
3. Love fiercely the people you love and who love you back.
I hate to be a downer, especially on my birthday. The sad truth is that getting older means losing people you love. And I've found you start to lose the people you will miss the most, that you'd always imagined would be around forever.
Growing older also means your circle gets smaller. You grow apart from friends and people you may have been closer to at different phases of your life. You add new things to your life — a partner, a child, a passion, whatever — and suddenly your spare time gets a lot rarer and more precious.
Love the people you love and who love you back. It's not easy. It's often the ones we love the most that we understand the least, too. But we can still love. We can still make time for each other, we can still lift each other up and cheer each other on. And we can argue and say hard things and reconcile, too.
As Anne Lamott writes, "And now is all we have, and love is who we are." So love each other real good, as she would say.
2. To be human is to create.
I've said it here before so I won't rehash all my platitudes about creativity. Just like dancing and music, if you find yourself in a rut, it's probably because you aren't creating something just for the sheer joy of creating.
Make something with your hands. Take a risk and learn to draw or paint or write poetry. Cook something, build something, act in a play.
Better still, share your creativity with other people. Creation is an act of love, too, and it's better when it's shared.
1. Never become a stranger to wonder.
If the world around you becomes boring, you're probably taking it for granted.
One of the lessons I've learned from photography is that everything can be extraordinary if you look at it just right. I think about this often when I'm with my one-year-old nephew. We laugh because he gets astonished at things like ceiling fans and airplanes and fire trucks. How amazing it must all look to him though! He looks at it every time as if he's never looked at it before. And he points his squishy little forefinger to make sure you get to see it, too.
I wish I could see the world the way he does, all bright and new. I'm doing my best by doing things like taking long walks and looking at daylilies, or eating delicious food and trying to guess what ingredients the chef used, or sitting on my couch with my mother and doing nothing at all. It all can give a sense of wonder, I think. It's not a bad way to go through life.
I'm sure that's more than enough for now. Certainly a good thing my procrastination kicked in to keep the list from being a full 37. Then we'd never get through it.
We're all just walking each other home, the spiritual guru Ram Dass reminds us. So let's walk lightly and bravely together friends. Be well.
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